Route 66: echoes of Steinbeck's desolation

Route 66: echoes of Steinbeck's desolation

John Steinbeck's epic novel of the great depression, The Grapes of Wrath, depicted destitute families struggling along Route 66 in search of work. Today, hard times still blight the lives of those living along the famous highway

Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles became a symbol of prosperity and the new-found freedoms of the rock’n’roll era. But in the 1930s it played host to years of misery as families, some on the brink of starvation, struggled along it in search of work

Route 66, near Calumet. Steinbeck wrote: "66 - the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi [river] to Bakersfield - over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert to the mountains again and into the rich California valleys."

Route 66, Wellston. "66 is the path of a people in flight," Steinbeck wrote. "Refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow, northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land, and steal what little richness is there."

Route 66, Erick. To travel the old road today — stumbling across crumbling ghost towns and half abandoned communities, across the sprawling native American desert reservations, through cities where people work all the hours they aren’t sleeping and still cannot afford to go to the doctor - is to encounter a new despair

In scenes eerily reminiscent of Steinbeck's novel, many families can barely afford to clothe themselves. This picture shows a clothing and shoes donation box on the roadside near Bristow, on Route 66/I-44 between Tulsa and Oklahoma City

The Good Samaritans mobile medical truck, here stationed at the Parkland Baptist Church, Tulsa, perpetually makes the rounds of the city's churches in run-down neighbourhoods, providing for the working poor, struggling pensioners and, increasingly, newly unemployed Americans, when their health becomes one more burden on top of the daily trial to pay the rent and put food on the table